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Property Law and Real Estate

Marx

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Private Ownership, Avihay Dorfman Dec 2009

Private Ownership, Avihay Dorfman

Avihay Dorfman

The most powerful response to the growing skepticism about the intelligibility of the idea of private ownership has been cast in terms of owners’ rights to the exclusive use of an object. In these pages, I argue that this response suffers from three basic deficiencies, rather than merely explanatory gaps, that render it unable to overcome the spectre of skepticism. These deficiencies reflect a shared want of attention to the normative relationship that ownership engenders between owners and non-owners. In place of the right to exclusive use, I set out to develop an account of private ownership that seeks to …


Wealth And Property, Thomas W. Merrill Jan 1990

Wealth And Property, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Stephen Munzer's study of property rights is an ambitious work. Drawing on sources as diverse as Hohfeld, Hegel, Locke, civic republicanism, Marx, the classic utilitarians, and Rawls, he seeks to develop a "pluralist" theory of property, one that synthesizes a variety of philosophical perspectives into a single "basic theory" that can be used to assess and promote the reform of different property systems. Like most attempts to achieve a grand philosophical synthesis, however, this one ultimately fails. The most obvious problem is that Munzer's basic theory is too vague and unwieldy to generate determinate answers to the kinds of …